2 June 2011. The TRUE Face of the Church… It’s the People…

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There’s much shouting and preening from SVS and from konvertsy pretending to be “clergy” and “monastics”… well… the Church is NOT embodied in a self-centred and hubristical seminary such as SVS… it’s NOT restricted to the clergy as hyperclericalist converts tell us (as Freddie M-G put it, “We have to follow the clergy”… if that’s so, it’s an explicit endorsement of the Unia and the Old Ritualists). The Church is the PEOPLE… first, last, and always. His Nibs just made a lovely statement on the laity, which I’m going to translate. The Church is the laity surrounding the clergy and the hierarchs… we’re NOT under them. We’re not pupils in a lecture hall, like the Proddies… we’re not suppliants at court, like the RCs… we’re not drunks in a tavern, like the Sectarians. We’re the Church… and that means that the People, the Laos, the Narod, are at the centre of things… sure, there are times when prideful crank clergy forget this… but God has HIS ways of “reminding” them… one such was the atheistic state of 1918-85… God expressly permitted it to chastise corrupt crook clergy, to purify his Bride by burning out the cancers that had taken up residence in it. We’re going through that in America, now… it’s rough… it’s tough… and there’s no other way.

That’s why we’re going through the crisis that we’re going through now in American Russian Orthodoxy… God the Father is “trampling out the vintage that the grapes of wrath hath stored”… Christ is wielding “a sharp sword” and He “treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God”… God the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, is there too… He reminds that there’s hope in all of this, that “these dry bones shall live”, and that Christ’s Bride will be in the tomb for only a spell, it’ll rise again, just as the Mother Church, cleansed of its stinking clerical corruption and nasty priestly malfeasance, did (all of Lebedeff’s horses and all of Lyonyo’s men won’t be able to stop it, either). THAT’S inspirational and hopeful, isn’t it?

BMD